Video surveillance in a retail environment is a common practice. However, it remains resource intensive to process captured video to automatically detect irregular activities. In retail environment, in order to automatically capture irregular activities such as cashier frauds at check-out lanes, sophisticated and resource intensive computerized pattern recognition algorithms need to be executed. By multiplying by the scale of the lanes (10˜20 each store and thousands nationwide), a significant amount of computational power is required to handle the huge volume of output generated by complex computer processing.
In addition, each store usually has only limited space and resources to handle all point-of-sale (POS) transactions and associated video streams. Available space may be sufficient for smaller stores that have fewer lanes, but it is not sufficient for larger stores with 15˜20 lanes, or even more. At the same time, retailers are not always willing to invest more into the hardware, software and services necessary to keep up with the need.
As a result, if the available computational resources cannot keep up with the need, useful information will be dropped due to this shortage, e.g., frames are dropped in the video streams and/or processing is limited to only a subset of video streams. This may cause many irregular activities to be missed, resulting in severe loss to the retailers.